My 4e Sweet Spot

I had been running a campaign since the launch of 4e with 7-8 people. I figured with more people, I would always have a nicely populated table, considering there’s always someone who can’t make it, or his wife needs him for something, or whatever other circumstance will crop up. If a few people missed a session, it wouldn’t matter. My problem is that those issues never really came up too much, and I had an overcrowded table most of the time.

The game played slow, but I took steps to remedy the situation. I had timers, laptop initiative tracking, pre rolled initiative for the monsters, great prep work, etc… It was manageable, but I know there were some issues with party size and the speed of play in my group. As the party made its way out of heroic and into paragon, those issues became more apparent and I took a brief hiatus from 4e for a little SW Saga.

Today, I made a few phone calls, and rebooted my D&D game. Back to square one, with less people. I had 4 people at the table, and we started from level one. I ran the first level Dungeon Delve adventure, which seemed a little familiar to the guys because it is very similar to the Kobold Hall adventure, down to the white dragon boss at the end. It’s what I had ready so it’s what they got. We started our campaign two years ago with Kobold Hall.

So I mention a sweet spot. In my opinion, and this is nothing more than my personal belief, our 4e sweet spot is in the heroic tier. Everything just moves faster. Combat and player decisions within it just move at a faster pace. The kind of stories I like to tell in the D&D world are all mostly within the realm of the heroic tier, and I just enjoy running it more as a DM.

In fact, I was sitting at the table about to pick up where our campaign left off, at the Demon Queen’s Enclave, and I said, “You know what guys, let’s reboot. Let’s go back to 1st level and start something fresh”. Well, they didn’t hesitate to fire up the character builders and make new 1st level characters, and I didn’t hesitate to come up with a quick story to make them all be traveling together towards a dwarven mining town and into Coppernight Hold.

Tools of the trade.

Tonight we had a blast, although we lost one PC and almost lost another one to that white dragon down in the mines. From here, we take off towards the Chaos Scar and the famous Keep on the Border-eh, Keep on the Chaos Scar. I am excited: new campaign, less people, short little adventures tied into a loose plot. I tried to be Tolkien, grand, and epic, and it didn’t work. Now I’m going to be episodic and light, lets see where it goes.

So I guess the moral of the story here is that if you are feeling a bit of burnout at your game, take a step back and look at why that is.

Is it the size of your party? Cut it. You are going to have to be the jerk that does it, but your DMing life will be simpler once you do.

Is it the game you are playing? Take a break, and play something else. Your books aren’t going anywhere, so don’t worry about not playing with them for a while.

Is it that your story seems a little unwieldy? Don’t be ashamed in dropping it and starting over. None of us (I think) is a master storyteller, nor earning a living at this. There’s nothing wrong with a reboot and a fresh start.

What do your players want? It’s their game too, so talk to them. They may want the same things you do and aren’t saying it. D&D has to be a two way street between the DM and the players.

So here we are. Almost two years to the date and starting anew. At least we are still gaming, and that’s the important part.

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I have, over the years, started and left unfinished a number of grand plotlines… after watching this happen a number of times, I realized I was trying to work my way up to the one encounter, villain, or moment that i had envisioned and built the plot around, but kept making it difficult and long-winded to get there, because I was so in love with the idea of it being awesome. My best moments as DM have always happened when I let the players take over the story and I just follow along, providing for their (and in the process, my own) fun. These days I prefer to let players have their way, and I find that they are happy with whatever adventure I come up with, because they’re having fun with their characters. The stories (which are the whole reason I enjoy RPGs) come naturally from those enjoyable experiences.
Thanks for sharing that. Awesome.

The heroic tier is my favourite tier, too. 🙂 The campaign I’m running now is explicitly heroic tier only. Once we get to 10th level, that’s it – threat vanquished, let’s go clubbing.

Also – and I don’t know if this is actually true from a mechanical standpoint – I get the vibe that the heroic tier is also the most lethal, which makes it very appealing to me.

Resources are more scarce, heroes are more fragile and limited in their power, quests are gritty and highly dangerous. In fact, I remember at a WotC seminar at GenCon last year, one of the panelists (maybe Rich Baker or Bruce Cordell or someone) remarked during the Q&A that the heroic tier played the most like ‘old-school’ D&D.

Great post, by the way. 🙂 Glad to see Dungeon Delve still gets some love – I’d snatch up Dungeon Delve 2 in a heartbeat, especially if they start designing challenges like the ones in the new Tomb of Horrors book.

I find the early levels are the most fun as a player. You are feeling out your character and finding what you are capable of and early bonds between players/characters are forming. Staring again from square 1 was a bold move, but I’m glad it worked out for you in the end.

Hmm I really want to reboot now. Though I wanted to do it for quite some time after all I learned and understood during all this time since both campaigns start.
As for cutting the size would be great, but highly imporbable.
Though I (and my players) fondly remember the blast we had playing in a party of 3 and 4. Good times. (Now I’ve got two parties of 5 and 7 peeps).

There’s nothing wrong with running campaigns structured to only encompass the heroic tier – in fact often you’ll find the story is tighter and the ending more satisfying when the campaign doesn’t span years of real time. It also let’s players to take more chances since they don’t need to worry about living to become a demi-god. Nowadays most of my 4E campaigns are specifically designed to cover only 10 levels or so since I’m no longer a fan of birth-to-death of old age games.

In my short time as a DM I have found that few things slow the game down quite like having too many people. This grind is enhanced when those “extra” players are not regulars. My particular challenge is that I run a game out of my FLGS which hinders my ability to close a game off at a certain number of player or choose which players are in my group.

I appreciate everyone’s insight on running smaller arcs versus on grand campaign. I feel pressure to have some epic overarching theme, but am not comfortable with plotting it out. Sounds like I am better off leaving it alone and sticking with the smaller adventures I have been running.

I have heard quite a bit about how Paragon Tier doesn’t play as well. I hope by the time we get there, people will have solutions.

I’ve found four players is about my optimal. I’ve been running D&D Encounters sessions with up to 7 and once the group gets that big it really does slow down. Also the more players the harder it gets to engage everyone with the role play sections.

My D&D (and World of Warcraft) experiences seem similar – starting new characters, the first 10 levels (in D&D, first 20ish in WoW) are the most exciting, and it is easy to leave a leveled character on hold and test out a new toon/PC/class/race or theme…

You can always go back to those higher level characters, bring them out for a one-off (or Tomb of Horrors delve), or even use them in your new campaign as NPCs if needed. I don’t know why Paragon and epic seem to slow down.. I guess it’s just too many options, every PC and mosnter has ways to slow down the enemy which in turn just slows down the game, and I guess if the average damage dealt to average hit points gained ratio isn’t equal, it starts taking longer to bring down the bad guys…

And finally, for people who are worried about their campaign arcs or fizziling games – it doesn’t really matter what levels you are playing, if there are 3 or 8 of you at a table, as long as you are having fun, you are doing it right. Doesn’t matter if it’s 4th edition, Star Wars, a rousing game of Boggle, or whatever… as long as you and your players/friends are having fun, it is all good.

Though a couple of my players have said that the Heroic tier is an utter waste of time (they also use cheat programs to get the WoW characters to level 70 in a week), I think that my sweet spot is also the low tier. When you start bringing in demigods and fate of the world stuff, it tends to be less plausible for me (I know… we’re playing a fantasy game).

My sweet spot is 4 players. 5 maximum if I want the game to flow right. The heroic tier seems like the sweet spot right now, but I haven’t spent enough time getting to know the paragon tier, so I am giving it a shot with a medium sized campaign starting near there (late heroic through paragon 16 maybe).

My largest group was 8 players and it was so hard to keep everyone on track and keep the sessions manageable. I will never do that again. In fact, I think I will stick with a no-more-than-5 rule from now on.

It’s funny. I like better the paragon tier than the heroic. For me it’s the place were everything good about D&D as a fantasy world happen. You encounter the manticore, chimera, giants, beholder and the mighty adult dragon… All the visual of the game. People got a paragon path who makes them diffrent even if the party got the same class from the beginning. You can still fight gnoll, troll and ogre, but the planes are open to get some good demon and devil. You can build a adventure who start in a town and finish in the underdark, the feywild or hell… So for me the paragon is realy were i can make the magic of the game happen. PC can start to kick the butt of the captain of the guard, argue with a powerful wizard or stop a highpriest and not the low level scum of help them maintain power. Thief can fight on roof and flying carpet, ranger can track a man throught the jungle and wizards create magic items. I have been a DM for 27 years now and getting just on the border of epic is my best creative place. The PC help contribute saving a part of the world but not the entire plane of existence. Orcus is always behind the story but you are still fear to end up in front of him if you get capture…

I haven’t really decided yet what my sweet spot is. I just know it isn’t Epic though. I just don’t get enthused about the out-of-this world aspect of that Tier, and I like my games more grounded.\

That said, I do like the Paragon levels even though the combats are a bit longer. My players seem to prefer the Paragon levels as well, since they do like the extra options (again, despite the games being longer). Plus a lot of my favorite monsters are Paragon level (the bigger dragons, mind flayers, and especially beholders).

Thanks all for the great answers…. I have to say this, while I prefer to run and play in Heroic, I must admit too that the best monsters are in Paragon. The beholders, mindflayers, and better dragons do indeed provide that iconic dnd experience. The beauty of 4e is that you can easily create verions of those monsters for the heroic tier if you really wanted to.

My level sweet-spot so far has been paragon tier easily. I like the sense that the PCs are MAJOR players in the world and most people default to them as movers and shakers who are in the know, so to speak. I like telling stories that involve demons, devils, direct interaction with the gods, and powerful NPCs who may not be able to simply walk all over the players. Paragon fits that really well while still leaving me the epic tier of challenges in place to make sure that if I need it I can still kick the PCs butts with vastly more powerful creatures/people.

My size, sweet-spot is similar to how you started your group. My group has maintained about 7 people and there is consistently one or two that can’t make it. So it works out just right. In over two years we’ve had to cancel exactly twice for not enough players and we’ve only had a full house about as many times.

The one trick I have used so far, is that I took a break, as a DM, for a while. I ran the party through heroic tier in about a year and a half and then stepped back for about 6 months before returning to the campaign. During that break someone else took over as DM and ran a mini-campaign within the same world as my campaign. He and I collaborated so make our two stories jive and complement each other. It’s a great way to recharge, playing.

As for re-starting story…I’ve done that a LOT, and it really bothers me. I game because I REALLY like telling stories. I put together campaigns because inspiration hit and there’s a story I HAVE to tell. I have several now that I’ve been trying to tell to conclusion for years. So this once I am going to see a campaign to it’s end. I’ve had the final encounter planned since before the campaign started, in fact since before I planned the first encounter. So I’m gonna get there, by all that’s holy, I will do it!

I’d also recommend passing the DM hat to someone else once in a while. Sitting down as a player can really reinvigorate you and give all kinds of ideas, and it removes the constant grind of coming up with material. It’s nice to just relax and let someone else do all the work.

I didn’t find it too complicated or taking too long (and this is with a group that is notoriously slow in combat). What I did notice was the … ahem… epicness of the PC’s abilities and the stories that were being told. Specifically, I ran the Eye of Flame (lvl 16) dungeon delve, and sending your PCs on a reconaissance mission into the elemental chaos is my type of story 🙂

I love Heroic Tier too because it’s the simplest. Above level 15 or so, I feel like there’s too much analysis paralysis and it becomes too freakin’ hard to provide any real threat because the characters have no chance of being killed.

To avoid a meandering storyline, I always decide at the beginning how long I’m going to run the campaign. At my university, that’s usually a semester (around 12-14 game sessions), which seems to be a great timeframe to tell a good story. If players aren’t enjoying it, then there’s no need to continue on because they all know it’s the end after that session. If players think it’s the best thing in the world and want to keep going, there’s no reason you can’t do it for another 12 sessions.

A good example that I have seen recently of paragon-level campaigns are from Penny Arcade. For example, the characters fought a battle on mini elemental planets in the floating through the elemental chaos. I believe that the story can be fun no matter what level you are at, as long as the players and the DM are in it together. Gabe described it in a two part post:

[…] My 4e Sweet Spot How many people are at your gaming table? 4, 6, 8, 12? Is it too many or not enough? It looks like NewbieDM had too many people in the group and had to make some cuts. It’s always a rough decision to remove someone from the gaming table, but in my past experiences it has always been because of personality conflicts, not overpopulation. Either way, it’s never an easy thing to do. Maybe NewbieDM’s words will help you out. […]